


If They Speak

by Anya (aCrowdOfStars)



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Angst, Gen, M/M, Post-Reichenbach, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-10
Updated: 2013-09-10
Packaged: 2017-12-26 04:18:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,759
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/961468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aCrowdOfStars/pseuds/Anya
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Sorrow you can hold, however desolating, if nobody speaks to you.  If they speak, you break down."</p>
<p>Sherlock's funeral. Post Reichenbach.</p>
            </blockquote>





	If They Speak

No one makes him plan the funeral, a reprieve of grief for which John is imminently grateful. He suspects Mycroft does, or perhaps Mrs. Hudson, but he never asks; he simply nods when Mrs. Hudson tells him the day -- Thursday -- and lets her buy him an appropriate suit with the handful of bills he presses into her hands. He almost wears his uniform, coming so close as to sending it out to be cleaned and pressed, but changes his mind at the last moment. It feels wrong to wear it to the funeral of a man so far removed from his life in the service of Her Majesty, and the more he thinks of it, the angrier he becomes. Her Majesty’s government and police force have forsaken Sherlock, smeared his name, tarnished the good he has done, all to cover their own useless arses. Wearing the uniform, John sees, will feel tantamount to treason. Treason against Sherlock.

He wears the suit Mrs Hudson brings.

It isn’t an orthodox service. Sherlock had barely ever acknowledged the existence of religion, much less expressed a desire to be spoken about by a priest, therefore a church was completely out of the question. The car that came to retrieve John and Mrs Hudson instead stopped at the front of an ornate, but nondescript, building. Stationed at the door was Mycroft and a generic looking man in a black suit, his presence partially explained by the curl of the wire around his ear that indicated a hidden third party. Their driver opens the door for John and Mrs Hudson, and they walk up the stairs, ignoring the small crowd of press that lingers at the bottom of the steps, shouting for their attention.

At the door, Mycroft nods at John, and a third man, a bulking guard with a grim expression, opens the door. John ignores the nod, facing forward as stiffly as possible. Mycroft had tried to contact him at least eight times in the past four days, and every attempt had been rebuffed; this would not be the place of their reconciliation, should it ever happen.

An usher leads them down the hallway to a large set of double doors, which open to a beautifully quiet room. At the head, a casket, made of dark wood and simple chrome fittings, sits closed, quiet in front of rows of seats. John stares at it for just long enough to feel Mrs Hudson grow uncomfortable at his arm, and he lets her guide him to a second room, almost as large as the previous one, but with a bar at the front, staffed by a young looking bartender and peppered here and there with people in black carrying serving trays of finger foods. It is a posh wake, to be followed by a posher service, lasting until it was decided that now was the time to lower the coffin into the ground and dump pounds of dirt in the sort of finality that John could barely comprehend. 

Within moments of entering, a young waitress approaches them, holding two glasses of wine. Mrs Hudson takes them both, thanking her quietly, and pushes one into John’s hand. He takes it without protest, though he wishes it was something just a little stronger. The urge to drift away from all of it, to disappear in the muddle corners of his mind, is too strong. He feels now like how Harry must feel constantly -- desperate to find something better at the bottom of a glass, willing to search the bottoms of all the glasses in the room for that feeling.

He sips the wine and resists the urge to gulp, and stations himself at a high table as more people filter into the room. 

It is impressive how many shades of mourning there are. 

Mycroft’s presence at the door becomes apparent. He is there to filter the guests, to play interference against those who would hope to be a prying eye into the privacy of Sherlock’s mourners, those gathered in faithful support of the man in the lovely coffin. When John finds himself wandering by the front door, momentarily desperate to get away from the people who insist on treating him as the chief mourner, he sees Mycroft lean to hear the whispers of the anonymous man at his side, and then shake his head at the man at the door requesting entrance. He is there to analyze the petitioners and allow entrance only to those with no ulterior motives.

A very quiet part of John recognizes the gift Mycroft offers, the one of the highest sentiment of which he is capable: the chance to grieve, for once, out of the view of unkind eyes. 

Clients are allowed entrance, stopping briefly in the room with the casket before entering the room filled with finger foods and quiet conversation. They all seek out John’s presence. They press their hands into his and apologize for his loss. They tell him that they know Sherlock never would lie, never would pretend, never would hurt anyone for his own satisfaction. He, not Mycroft, is the focus of the grief they attempt to give away, tinged in guilt or regret or genuine disbelief. 

Angelo is terrifyingly close to tears as he gathers John into an impromptu embrace. “He wasn’t the nicest man, but he wasn’t cruel,” Angelo says gruffly. “He didn’t like the attention. He liked the chase. He liked the mystery. There’s no mystery, is there, when you’ve written it yourself.” He pulls away from John, hands on John’s upper arms. “Are you alright?”

“I’m alright,” John says for what feels like the thousandth time. 

“You’re welcome whenever you like, you know. Whenever you feel hungry, you come see me. I’ll feed you up.”

“Thank you, Angelo, very much. Thank you for coming.”

“‘Course I came. He saved me from prison. All for nothing, didn’t even pay him. He just liked the challenge. Wanted to prove he was smarter, but he wanted to it on his own terms, see?”

“I know.” John gently steps out of Angelo’s hold. “I know that.”

One by one, everyone in the room comes to John. They press their hands into his, pull him into hugs, pat his cheek, promise him that he isn’t alone, that their favors for Sherlock’s work have now become his favors. He’s inherited Sherlock’s good graces with the restaurateurs of England. He’s inherited the discounts and good opinions of shop owners, small time criminals, landed gentry, and common folk. They do not offer their condolences to Mycroft, Sherlock’s only blood relative in attendance, but to his flatmate, his partner, his something or other.

No one outright says it, but they hint around it gently. “I’m so glad he found someone” “He seemed so happy last I saw him” “You were so good for him, anyone could see” “This must be so difficult, please don’t hesitate to call”

John wants to scream at all of them. He wants to shove them away and tell them what a coward he was, is, will always be, because they weren’t, they aren’t, they never will be more than flatmates. He didn’t make Sherlock a better person; Sherlock made him a whole person; took a half-broken ex-soldier and made him something better. He wants to march into the other room that holds the coffin and shove it open and demand Sherlock stop throwing the most long-lasting, most damaging strop of his life, and climb out of the bloody coffin and get back to _bloody fucking work_. 

Harry arrives after an hour, and seeks him out immediately, bypassing the bar and the main room, and she clasps her hands around his and pulls him away from the people who seek to grasp at him and ask how he’s handling all this. She drags him down a hallway, then left, then down another hallway, finally pulling him into a darkened room that looks as if it has been sadly neglected by the cleaning crew. She holds his hands for a minute, before pressing her palm against his cheek and curling her fingers a bit at the hair about his ears. “Oh, John.” 

Something terrible and sharp spasms in his chest, and he closes his eyes and lets his baby sister run her fingers (not shaking, fingernails whole and unbitten, cuticles undamaged, sober and gentle in their movements) through his hair, and something terrible works its way out of his chest. It scratches and claws and writhes until it escapes his mouth in the form of a constricted sob. John has a brief moment of watching tears trace their way down Harry’s face before she’s pulling him to her, pressing his face to her shoulder, fingers of one hand carded in his hair, the fingers of the other hand clutching at his chest. “Oh, Johnny,” she whispers again, gathering him to her as he breathes into her neck in staccato gasps. 

They will never be the siblings who call each other daily or weekly or maybe even monthly to talk about how their jobs are or how life is going or how they feel about the latest films or shows or music, but Harry holds him exactly how she held him when their mother died of a disease that came too swiftly and stole her too absolutely, and exactly how she held him when he explained that the only way to pay for their father’s hospice care was by going to war, and exactly how they held each other when they realized they were all alone in the world. 

She holds him because of all the people in the rooms beyond theirs, no one will know how badly held together the Watson children are at all times.

After awhile, just long enough to bring him comfort but not too long that either could resent the other, Harry pulls away, thumbs the tears they both pretend aren’t there off his cheeks, fixes his tie, smooths the lines of his dress shirt. “Alright, love?”

“No,” he says honestly, looking away from her at the door. “No, not alright.” He doesn’t want to say it now, or ever, but if he can’t say it to Harry, he’ll never say it. It has to be said, or hinted at, or at least acknowledged. “I thought we had forever.”

“We always do.”

“I am a coward.”

“You are the bravest man I know. Hey, look at me,” she says, “and stop it. You are and will always be the bravest man I know. I don’t know the man I’m here to mourn, but I know that if he’s worthy of being mourned by you, he’s worthy of my respect.” 

“Thank you for coming.”

“If it was me, you would’ve come. You’ve got to get out there, you know. They came for you.”

“They came for Sherlock.”

Harry’s laugh is cold and jagged. She smooths down the lines of her dress and adjusts his tie again, uselessly. “Funerals are never for the dead. They are for the ones left behind. They’re here to pawn their grief onto you, since yours is the worst. They want to give you all their sadness, because they think you can handle it.”

“I don’t want to give a speech.” He wants it to be a statement, but it comes as a plea. His hands find hers, tangle their fingers. He thinks of how miserably he failed at telling the crowd at his mother's graveside exactly why he was willing to sign away his life to help her to stay. The panic reaches a fever pitch in his chest that Harry calms with her forehead ducked to his chest, her hands pressed palm-to-jacket at his back.

“I’ll speak for you.”

\--+--

It is mere minutes after Harry and John reenter the refreshments room that the giving of sympathies begin anew, but it is easier now. Harry presses a fresh wine glass into his hands and takes a Shirley Temple for herself. She replaces his empties with fresh ones but stays to her ginger ale and grenadine, and never says a word against it. She will be sober for him, because the alcoholic in her sees and respects the desire for oblivion, and the sister in hers sees and respects the need for a source of familiar stability.. 

An interminable amount of time passes before the ushers discreetly push the gathered to begin to choose their seats in the adjoining room. Their insistence is careful and exact, and the room slowly empties. John stays at the door he and Harry had used to escape, unwilling, unable, incapable of following the sea of greys, whites, and blacks into the audience seats of Sherlock’s coffin. Harry squeezes his elbow, and draws his attention to a well dressed, strained looking man at a side door. He isn’t an usher or employee. His clothes are expensive in an obvious and attractive way, and his face is wan and terrified when he catches John’s eyes. He looks tempted to turn tail and flee, but doesn’t. Harry presses a kiss to John’s cheek, and asks him to come whenever he’s ready before leaving him in the wide, empty room with the unknown man.

They stare at each other in silent appraisal until the creak of a door announces Mycroft’s presence. Both men turn to look, both men grimace, and Mycroft frowns, “John,” he says, nodding again, and then he turns to the unknown entity. “Victor.” The man at the door stills, then nods as well, eyes flicking desperately to John and again to Mycroft. “I will delay the proceedings a short while to give you both privacy.” He ducks his head and disappears into the room where everyone has gathered, closing the heavy doors behind him. 

There is nothing but silence for some time. Neither men look at one another. John drains his glass, relishing the warm spread of the beginnings of drunken disconnect at his fingertips. The man at the doorway shuffles back and forth on well-made shoes, tugging at his shirt cuffs. John has never seen him before, but the name means something. Something in his head is ringing loudly, telling him of a significance he can’t quite recall. The man offers nothing for some time; indeed, he looks ready to bolt at any moment. John wonders, with a vague sense of bubbling hysteria, how long two grown men can play emotional chicken at a funeral, before the man speaks. 

“John Watson?” It is a question to which the man already knows the answer, but it is as decent a beginning of speech as either can manage. John nods at him, and the man crosses half the room and freezes. “I’m Victor Trevor.”

The ringing of recognition becomes louder, but John’s face remains neutral, even as he nods to acknowledge his own identity and the introduction of the man in front of him. Victor Trevor frowns and looks away, then back again. “Did he ever mention me?”

“You knew him at university,” supplied John, unintentionally. His mouth moves of its own accord. “You were friends at Cambridge.” Trevor grimaces down at his cufflinks, worrying the mother of pearl between his fingertips. “He mentioned you once or twice.”

Something close to pain flickers across Trevor’s face, hard enough to quiet John from further exposition. Trevor glances at the door via which he’d entered, then seems to draw a strength from somewhere unknown, bolstered enough to step forward enough paces to be within arms reach of John, though he makes no move to demonstrate the fact. 

“I shouldn’t have come.” Trevor released his cufflinks as if he was aware, suddenly, of the nervousness of the action. “But it didn’t seem-- I had to-- I can’t--”

“You weren’t friends at Cambridge.” The knowledge floods into John’s mind so terrifyingly quickly, he wonders if Sherlock felt like this all the time. Intuition translates quickly to fact, an entire story unfurling before John, told in the fiddling of cufflinks, the curls of Trevor’s hair, the press of his suit. “You were together.” The suddenly thin press of Trevor’s mouth is confirmation enough. “He didn’t tell me.”

“No, he wouldn’t.”

“I’m sorry,” they say at the same time, and there is a brief pause, and then a shared amused exhale. John looks at Trevor, truly, for the first time. His boyish face is offset by the pristine cut and press of his suit. His shoes, the cloth, his cufflinks are expensive, blatantly so, but his watch is not. It isn’t cheap, but it isn’t flashy, which is strange, as watches are the preferred way of announcing the wealth of man, short of a flashy car. The watch was a gift, John reasons, purchased years ago, recently brought from a hiding place, judging by the dullish glint of the glass over the face. 

Trevor glances down at his wrist, following John’s gaze, and flushes. He’s handsome, but not obviously so. Wealth and a happy life have lent him a pleasant face and a happy demeanor. He’s wealthy, but takes pride in his work and not the compensation for it. He wears a wedding ring, the ring of a man who loves his wife and the life she gives him, but his face is full of longing and regret, shadowed in this grandiose room.

And he’s terrified.

And heartbroken.

John is overcome with the urge to apologize that he has to be here, standing in an empty room in a good suit with a man who might be the one who could have usurped him, but was too stupid to try. He wants to ask Trevor what Sherlock was like at home alone, or home in bed, or really any version of Sherlock John had never been privy to see. He wants to know all the corners of Trevor’s knowledge of Sherlock, only so that he can squirrel away the borrowed memories and make them his own. 

It is terribly selfish. 

“I had to come,” Trevor says at barely as whisper. “I shouldn’t have. I’m not supposed to be here. But I had to come.”

“You’re more than welcome here.”

“No, I’m not,” says Trevor, and he laughs a little then, with no humor. “I practically had to bribe Mycroft.”

John waits, because he knows that it’ll come without his prompting. The confessions Trevors wishes to offer are working their way to the surface, and nothing from John will hurry their arrival.

“I made him leave me.” Trevor fiddles with the watch, and John thinks of a cab ride to a crime scene and a baritone voice telling him of sentiment and gifts kept because of it. “Because he could see that it was never going to be the way he and I hoped. I had…” Trevor trails off to glare at the opposite wall, the first flickerings of anger on his face. “I had obligations.” He drags his eyes back to John. “I had promises and obligations to keep, and Sherlock wasn’t the best at keeping promises.”

“No, he wasn’t.”

“Did you- did he- I’m sorry, I know it isn’t my business, and I know, considering-” Trevor waves his hand towards the other room, face crumpling, hands shaking, “Was he happy? For awhile?”

“Yes,” says John, surprising even himself. He takes a moment to evaluate his response. He thinks of Sherlock grinning with delight in the middle of a complicated crime scene. He thinks of his arm around Mrs Hudson and declaring the state of England in relation to his landlady. He thinks of the soft strains of Bach drifting up the stairs of 221B, drawing John from the beginning clutches of a nightmare to the well worn armchair, where he would sit quietly and let the soft strains of Suite no 1 ease the tension in his knuckles and jaw until he could drag his eyes to Sherlock’s and smile his grateful but silent thanks. He closes his eyes and thinks of the gentle curve of Sherlock’s fingers in his late one night, when the crime was solved and the culprit caught and the adrenaline singing in their veins, and the carefully maintained distance as they stared at each other, flush with victory and so paralyzed with fear. 

He thinks of late night Chinese restaurants, Indian takeaway, overpriced French, hastily eaten chips, the way Sherlock moved through tight corridors, the sound of his coat as he ran through alleys, the nights spent half asleep in emergency rooms and police stations, the steady drip of raindrops off black curls...

Someone shifts quietly into the room, someone small and pale and dressed in all black, a woman by the shape, but a woman John does not recognize, and Trevor glances at the figure and then back to John. He closes his eyes and seems to draw in an unknown strength, something just enough to push him forward until he was a breath from John. His voice drops to a pitch just above a whisper, and in a moment that surprises them both, he grabs one of John’s hands. “I don’t know if you were anything more than just a friend, but,” and he leans close to John and seems to resist the urge to pull them into an embrace, “I am thankful he had someone like you at all.”

They part. They nod. If Trevor sees his cowardice, he doesn’t say. John does not voice the disbelief that anyone would allow Sherlock to slip so easily from his fingertips. The figure in the doorway stifles something that sounds maybe like a sigh, maybe like a sob, and Trevor whispers that he’ll be in touch, but he cannot be here, and disappears beyond the door and beyond John’s reach. 

John goes to the first room, where the gathered faithful bow their heads before Sherlock’s coffin and offer voiceless and endless pity for John. He takes his seat between Mrs Hudson and Harry and allows them to touch him and offer support at their fingertips, where Molly behind him slips a delicate hand to his shoulder, and he stares at the coffin and wishes he hadn’t wasted his one favor with god on his own life. He listens to the brave who stand before crowd and offer their eulogies, and thinks of dinners at Angelo’s and whispered conferences in alleyways and nineteen year old university students with more bravery than he had ever had. 

He thinks of everything Trevor had and lost, and everything he never had but always wanted, and feels the loss of it all.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this while incredibly inebriated and listening to very sad music. Please pardon all grammatical and spelling errors. I think there might be more to this that I want to write. I'll consult my second bottle of wine and see what she says.


End file.
